Hear ye, hear ye, Money Saving Lords and Ladies! It’s Freedom Friday where I have shared our progress in becoming completely debt free. It’s also your turn to share your story of debt slaying. Whether you’ve paid off every cent you owe, are just getting started, or live somewhere in the in between, we want to hear from you! We’re better together, share your story and make us all stronger.
Ours was the typical “girl meets boy” story where she meets him, falls madly in love, goes home and tells her mom she’s found the boy she will marry…that is if the typical story starts in fifth grade. We grew up best friends and by college were dreaming of our someday family. We talked about our “potpourri family” where every kid was a different color, because adoption was a big part of our plan.
Fast forward through college, wedding, grad school, 2 apartments, first house, first baby, moving to a different state, 2nd and much bigger house, 2nd and 3rd baby, 6 different cars, travelling to 9 different countries for work and missions. Boom. Suddenly we are grown-ups with a grown-up house, 3 growing girls, grown-up bills coming in every day and…well, that dream of adoption seemed like a distant and unattainable goal that only crazy people went after.
When our small group at church wanted to go through Financial Peace University, we honestly thought it wasn’t for us. We had done the junky apartments and cars with the ceiling falling down and had waited 5 years to have kids so that we could get out of college debt and we weren’t into over using our credit cards. We thought we were ok. We took the class and learned we were wrong. We learned about budgets and emergency funds (what?) and gazelles and we were hooked. We buckled down and did the emergency fund. We remembered our dream of adoption. We decided to go pre-emptive on this whole adoption thing. We pretended we were $25,000 in debt and went gazelle intense. Within a year we had half our adoption fully funded. We started the paper chase while still keeping things tight. Since the process takes a year, we had that second year to continue saving. It was simply amazing. Even in the midst of our own adoption we had the funds to help another family with their adoption.
People are always asking me how much it costs to adopt and when I tell them, they get this disappointed “we could never afford that” look on their face. It KILLS me. The process it took to get here was hard, freeing, amazing and 100% worth it. And now, well, I have the cutest little boy on the planet.
Thanks Lady Heather for this amazing story. And, I have seen that little boy and he very may well be the cutest little boy on the planet. 🙂 E-mail me your story to share on a Freedom Friday in the future!
